


To the Wood we Came

by chr1711



Category: The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:28:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25878187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chr1711/pseuds/chr1711
Summary: At the end of the War against the Martians, the painter Paul Nash finds something in a woodland.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	To the Wood we Came

TO THE WOOD WE CAME  
_  
Few would have imagined, in the early years of the twentieth century, that humankind was being observed from afar, as a researcher observes the teeming of minuscule creatures underneath a microscope. And that slowly and surely they drew their plans against us.  
_  
Few, including the lean, asthmatic man who right now is sitting in a clearing in the woodland prosaically kinown as The Wood. He has a sketchbook on his knees and a 4b pencil in his hand and dreaming all the time of Weymouth, or the south coast around Purbeck, or his beloved Wittenham Clumps, fallen to the terrible rain of a Martian war-machine.  
The Wood isn’t what it was; clumps of red weed swarm up the ancient oaks and the hornbeams, the elders and the beech. Infection, he thinks. Why is it always infection? Humankind is an infection on the surface of the Earth. Perhaps the Martians were the solution, like the barbarians.

“Waiting for the Barbarians” is one of his wife’s favourite poems. She has, after all, Egyptian connections like Cavafy himself. Dear Margaret. The only good result of his time at the Slade (“why do I have to do life drawing? I know what people look like”) was meeting and marrying her. But she, now, is somewhere on the south coast, probably in Weymouth, far from the war machines and their death rays, far from their building of a new world.  
There is a sudden chuffing rumble and a metallic shriek and for a startled moment Paul thinks the Martians have found their way here; but it is only a train, hurtling along the nearby railway line, probably getting out of London. There have been so few trains lately that to hear one is a shock.

Paul coughs bitterly. Always a cough, always a cold, always wheezing. Even night-time in the desert wouldn’t have helped; but dear Margaret encourages him to move on, place to place. Some places are good, meaning he is inspired to paint, and others less so. There seems no formula for a good place versus a bad. 

He shelters in wreckage embedded in the trees, something between the legendary Vedovelli V-class aeroplane (The Phantom of Issy-les-Moulineaux, so called by ace reporter Jacques Beauregard due to its being glimpsed around the airfield being tinkered on but never once actually seen to fly) and the equally legendary WSK-Mielec Belphegor, which to his surprise did reach production. I suppose in a command economy you do what you’re told. By all accounts many are still in regular use … as chicken coops. Useless as aeroplanes the wingless fuselages are ideal for your cluckers and layers.

Both planes were record breakers in their own way: the Vedovelli, possibly the largest flying machine in the world at the time, although ‘fly’ it scarcely did, has gone down in history as the ugliest, an overengineered behemoth that appears to defy Euclidean geometry. The Belphegor on the other hand was the only from-the-outset jet-powered biplane and the slowest operational jet aircraft, as solid as a brick outhouse and better used as one (or a chicken coop, q.v.).  
Paul contemplates the wreckage which partakes of these two machines equally; product of some Martian mind perhaps that had only the birds to go on and heard the wind in the wires, launching itself aloft on this strange new world they were building until it crash-landed in a dead sea of wrecked mechanicals.

He sneezes. Some new contaminant, perhaps, unbelievable desolation raining down from the stars, the very reason he gave up on those people with their depressing self-hatred years ago and became a wanderer around the south and west of England while as dear Margaret agreed he was temperamentally better suited to France. And yet had he gone to France he would have missed the Wittenham Clumps; no quick trains back up to the Home Counties for him. Now the Clumps are shorn of their vegetation and their very shapes are wrecked; but could he cast off the shackles of home and go to Paris, say, or the Cote d’Azur? It seems unlikely. He surveys the tangled wreckage around him and the shorn-off trees in this part of the Wood and thinks it a silver sea forever breaching on the safe soil of South London.And given the state of his lungs a new contaminant will probably kill him before long. He imagines the shapes around him rebuilt, equivalents for the wrecked tripods, the leafless trees. 

Something shifts in the wreckage beneath him where he sits. He moves, stands up quickly, thinking he has disturbed a fox, something roosting in the tangle below. He coughs again, abruptly, and there is a scurrying from within the broken fuselage, if you can call it a fuselage. Something tentacular and almost completely void of energy flops limply into the dim sunlight; followed by another which waves in the air and collapses back like wrack dragged into the undertow.  
_There’s someone in it … people in it!_  
And Paul is face to face with a Martian, its oval-eyed, teardrop-shaped head lolling up at him and its breath wheezing and hissing as the rain begins to fall.  
_I know how that feels, old friend,_ he thinks.  
He knows the creature beneath him is dangerous; and yet that it will not survive. Not just an enemy; The Enemy. Is it like a bear, able to lash out with a dying paw and smash a fragile human skull; or is it truly sinking back, powerless, into the primordial dark whence we all came and into which we must all go? The tentacles grip the broken controls of its flying machine and the V-shaped lipless mouth twists and hisses something.  
_You have not survived,_ he thinks, _and perhaps, neither did I._  
Paul reaches for the tentacle nearest him and grips it, half expecting perhaps the Martian to seize him around the throat - though only humans have ever done that to him - and choke the life out of him.  
_What, more than usual?_  
But as he does so the huge eyes close and the creature slumps back into its machine. Paul knows when something is dead, he has seen it often enough during the war against the Martians, and he is seeing it now.  
A bird calls once from a branch and flaps off into the leaden air against a silvery sky. Paul lets go and walks through the wood, his thoughts tormented and as dark as the shadows between the trees.  
Far away a train puffs asthmatically along, heading for the ruins of Woking and beyond them, the sea at Portsmouth. 

_We are building a new world._

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to imagine Paul Nash if his war was the Martian War and not the 1914-18. The reference to the wrecked aircraft, as well as evoking his painting 'Totes Meer' (Dead Sea) is anachronistic in bringing in the 1970s-vintage Belphegor but I wanted to mix that reference with the equally peculiar Vedovelli (1910-12).   
> Of course it's all a reference to the pandemic, what with viruses ravaging the population, and also possibly Brexit, sealing our Paul in the UK despite his affinity for 'La France.'  
> Paul's wife Margaret Odeh is an interesting character and some time I mean to do a Wikipedia page for her.


End file.
